You have to admire chip maker STMicroelectronics' cojones - or boggle at the company's seeming stupidity. It is promoting the word 'iPad' as both an acronym and a trademark.
You'll note that, in the sentence above, we use Apple's capitalisation, and that's the way World+Dog writes it too. Not STMicro, which capitalises the lot …

"Trademark law in motion nations"

RIM shot

"But a number of readers don't like this approach, preferring 'RIM', even though it is still spoken and read as a word, because they are either used to seeing it that way in print, or because they feel it mocks their favoured smartphone platform."

...or because it's the correct way of representing it, given that it's an acronym ? I'm not aware of any rule that says you can't try and pronounce an ancronym - indeed it's often the fact that they facilitate vocal recounting that drives their construction.

You _could_ choose you own way of doing things of course, and ignore what most of the rest of the universe does, nothing wrong with that at all - no no - but in this case it just comes across as a rather juvenile "Yeah i'm different - look at me, man - all edgy and different and cool n'that"... at least to my mind.

Oh yes - and you don't tend to use Rim instead of RIM anyway, do you ?... even in those stories whose title has 'Rim' in it.

RADAR?

"...or because it's the correct way of representing it, given that it's an acronym ? I'm not aware of any rule that says you can't try and pronounce an ancronym - indeed it's often the fact that they facilitate vocal recounting that drives their construction."

Yes, you mean like LASER, RADAR, SONAR, etc.? Oh, wait...

If I remember right, acronym means a shortened form of a phrase, spoken as a word, and RIM pronounced R-I-M (as I do, actually), would be an initialism.

Re : RADAR

> "...or because it's the correct way of representing it, given that it's an acronym ? I'm not aware

> of any rule that says you can't try and pronounce an ancronym - indeed it's often the fact that they

> facilitate vocal recounting that drives their construction."

> Yes, you mean like LASER, RADAR, SONAR, etc.? Oh, wait...

Yep - you're right - they have become commonly used words now - doesn't stop the acronym properly being represented in capitals however, and as time progresses and RIM becomes more such a word i'll stop being such a prig (probably). That said, it could be argued the initialism/acronyms for things like laser should have been in lower case (as both types involve the initial letters of the words comprising the resulting acronym/initialism, and all the words in, e.g. laser are properly lower case modulo initial capitalisation) whereas Research In Motion (as capitalised by the company themselves) would result in either giving an upper case result.

> If I remember right, acronym means a shortened form of a phrase, spoken as a word, and

> RIM pronounced R-I-M (as I do, actually), would be an initialism.

There is quite a debate about the precise meaning of acronym vs initialism - I find acronyms are typically classified as initialisms which result in words (rather than collections of letters). You pronounce RIM as arr-aye-emm, so initialism is appropriate - I say 'rim', as does the article I was referring to, so acronym would (arguably) seem closer.

Correction

"I find acronyms are typically classified as initialisms which result in words"

Sorry - not strictly right and not what I intended. What I was trying to say was that acronyms can be, and often are, initialisms (but may use more letters, as in 'radar') but they should result in a 'word'. Initialisms, as far as i've come across, are not acronyms, e.g. IBM is probably not going to be a word (you never know though..) whereas RIM/rim (lip, edge etc) is not only pronouncable but already a proper word (cf. NATO which never was, until it was)

It's all silly...

I think that there are things that are both acronyms and initialisms simultaneously, such as laser. Radar and sonar aren't acronyms, so my original examples are fallacious. Oh, whatever. I'm off down the pub.

iPad, IPAD??

Good for STMicroelectronics - we need someone to challenge the corporate bullies

If Jobs could have his way he would stick 'i' in front of every word in the Oxford dictionary and claim every damn word for himself with the exception of a few that wouldn't look good in his Walled Garden.

Jobs is a serial plagiariser having stolen many of the names he claims as his from others, including the name 'apple'.

As for capitilisation I still prefer the 'old' way REME, BA, RIM, etc. Reading the BBC (not Bbc) web site is irritating as all the familiar letter groupings have changed. At least my spell checker gets them right, now!

This is the first time I have ever seen...

RAM written as Ram or ROM written as Rom.

Ram and Rom are quite simply wrong in my view. Either they are acronyms, in which case they should be uniformly capitalised (RAM / ROM), or they are simple words, in which case - since they are not proper nouns - they should not be capitalised at all (ram / rom).

Capitalisation has nothing what-so-ever to do with pronunciation. Pronunciation of acronym's is a question of convenience/personal aesthetic.

To wit: SQL, which some prefer to pronounce as "Ess-Que-Ell" whilst others prefer "sequel", but however you choose to *say* it, it is *written* simply as SQL, not sql, and not Sql (unless as part of some product name with arbitrarily chosen capitalisations for aesthetic/trade mark protection reasons).

LASER, RADAR etc are odd cases because those have become words - they have a dual existence. They are acronyms that have become synonymous with homophonic and homographic words that are NOT acronyms.

In exactly the same way that "hoover" has become synonymous with "vacuum cleaner" - but we don't capitalise "Hoover" when used as a generic reference to a vacuum cleaner, only when used as a proper noun, to refer to the company (or dam or former US president) of that name.